Carlos Rosario school inaugurates new campus
By hola | Published | 3 Comments
On Oct. 9, The Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School celebrates the opening of the Sonia Gutierrez Campus, the 43-year-old adult learning center’s new building in Northeast Washington, D.C.
The school got it’s start in the 1970s as the Program for English Instruction to Latin Americans (PEILA), founded by the late community leader Carlos Rosario. Since then, the award-winning institution that has helped more than 60,000 immigrants acquire language and job skills and improve their lives. Wednesday’s inaugural festivities also mark a milestone of the school, which has weathered many difficulties.
The new campus is named for Sonia Gutierrez, the school’s president and founder, who refused to let it be shuttered forever by budget cuts in the mid-1990s, and has seen it through several changes since then.
Each day, as many as 500 students, hailing from dozens of different countries but all residing in the District, take classes at the new 50,000-square-foot state of the art campus. The new building is also eco-friendly, having been built to LEED Gold specifications, some of the country’s most stringent environmental and energy efficiency building rules.
Inside there’s a modern commercial kitchen helmed by two master chef-instructors of the school’s culinary arts program. Computer science and health courses are also offered along with English as a second language courses and more.
Among the people the school has helped over the years is Fausto Amaya, who spent two years in the mid-2000s learning English and taking culinary classes at the school’s flagship campus on Harvard Street NW. After graduation, Amaya was able to trade in a dishwasher job for a cooking gig at an Adams Morgan restaurant, before returning to the new campus this fall, this time as employee. He is now the sous chef and runs its airy, sunlight-filled cafeteria, which offers meals prepared daily by chefs-in-training.
“Probably I would still be stuck in the same place where I was,” if he hadn’t discovered the Carlos Rosario school, says Amaya, who got up every day at 7 a.m. to attend classes before heading to work until 1 a.m., only to get up the next day and do it all over again. “You have to work hard but it’s worth it.”
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